In lots of articles on the web about recommendation engines the terms Personalization and Recommendations are used equivalent whereas they are definitely not.
This blog post will shed some light on the difference between recommendations and personalization and how to distinguish both.

ChrisThe Difference Between Recommendations and Personalization10.24.2018

When you think of personalization you also think of a perfect customer journey, beautiful looking recommendation widgets and the best matching articles? Of course you do. But when it comes to results and to the marketing and sales department, they just care of the numbers.

Here are 8 important personalization key performance indicators you have to track daily.

Building an Alexa Skill is very easy if you combine it with Recolize personalized product recommendations. In the following I will describe the required steps and during the course of this blog post we will develop a sample skill that you can use as a starting point for your individual skill. The sample skill is available on our Github account.

We will create a so-called Custom Alexa Skill that will be able to simply answer the question “Alexa, open Recolize and ask what can you recommend to me today?” or “Alexa, open Recolize and ask what is the recommendation for today?“.
Therefore we need the Skill definition and additionally a AWS Lambda function that will trigger our Recolize recommendation API. The beauty of AWS Lambda is that you do not need to provision any servers but the so-called serverless framework will only be active if someone asks Alexa to trigger your skill. For more information on AWS Lambda functions see the official documentation.

We use the official Ask CLI commands to easily deploy both the skill itself as well as the Lambda function that will call the Recolize API.

ChrisHow to Build an Alexa Skill for your Online Shop with Recolize in 15 Minutes?08.09.2018